Let me offer an example to suggest how sensitivity to where others are coming from rather than thinking in slogans can have a positive effect.
Karl Hess, jr., Randal O'Toole, Rocky Barker, and I (and possibly others) have been working from complementary directions on the idea of democratic national forest trusts as an alternative to national forests. Currently, such forests mean a substantial percentage of especially western land is under the incompetent oversight of Congress and the lunatics in the executive branch.
Democratic trusts would be free from governmental control, their boards elected by citizens who chose to join the trusts. They would be responsible for raising their own money - but would not be organized like corporations, where market prices are basically commands rather than serving as signals. There is much more to the proposal, but think a decentralized version of the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
If they were successful, they could also be adapted to BLM lands.
The concept is voluntary, frees land from government control without thereby subjecting it to corporate control, and constructively addresses issues that many environmentalists hold dear, while also being open to local communities. It serves what we political theorists term public values. (These are different from what economists call public goods.)
For some time I have been speaking about the idea with the staff of Wild Earth, one of the best, and most influential, radical ecology journals - you know, the ones the likes of Fred Smith like to denounce as the implacable enemy of everything good. They say they will be printing an article of mine arguing for the concept.
by Gus diZerega on February 4, 2005 at 1:54 PM